Serbian Municipal Honour for War Criminal Dismissed as ‘Political Game’

Serbian General Vladimir Lazarevic (R) during his initial appearance at the ICTY in the Hague, the Netherlands, February 2005. Photo: EPA/BAS CZERWINSKI/POOL

The decision of the local assembly of Pantelej, a municipality of the city of Nis, the biggest city in southern Serbia, to make a convicted war criminal, Vladimir Lazarevic, an honorary citizen is not surprising and represents part of the “petty political game” of the ruling party, NGO activists told BIRN.

The now pensioned general during the 1998-9 Kosovo war commanded the Pristina Corp in the Yugoslav Army and was later sentenced to 14 years in prison by the Hague tribunal, ICTY, for murders, deportations and inhumane treatment of Kosovo Albanians during the war together with other Serbian army and police officials.

According to the news portal Juzne vesti, Lazarevic has lived in Nis since his release from prison but not in the municipality of Pantelej.

Ivana Zanic, director of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre, says the decision is not much of a surprise since few voices ever spoke publicly about Lazarevic’s ICTY conviction.

It was “the practice in general and the public discourse that all Serbian generals convicted before the Hague Tribunal – this is something incidental in their biographies, which does not determine them, and they are exclusively honourable people who contributed to the defence of the homeland”, Zanic told BIRN.

The director of the Nis-based NGO, the National Coalition for Decentralization, Mladen Jovanovic, said: “We are victims of the petty political game of the ruling [Progressive] party” in which the “much more important interest of the state is sacrificed“ for the sake of wooing part of the electorate.

“This flirtation is going in a way that, on several occasions already very important and good initiatives are launched at state level … and then the same party … through these local authorities [addresses] their voters who are chauvinistically nationally determined [… and] they must somehow satisfy these people,” Jovanovic told BIRN.

Vladimir Lazarevic (centre) checking a map after Yugoslav forces moved the buffer zone at Miratovac near the Macedonian border, March 2001. Photo: EPA PHOTO-SRDJAN SUKI-SS

Juzne vesti reported that Pantelej municipality president Natasa Stankovic said Lazarevic deserved to be made an honorary citizen because he was “a brave and dedicated military leader who consistently followed his highly professional, military, patriotic and human convictions, and in every temptation was ready to take sole personal and professional responsibility and thus defend the honour of the nation and the state”.

Lazarevic confirmed he had been notified about award.

“As far as I understand, I only saw part of the text, they are just looking at the contribution during the defence of the country from NATO aggression, when I was the commander of the Pristina Corps,” Lazarevic told Juzne vesti.

Lazarevic was released from prison in December 2015, after serving two-thirds of his sentence. He was given a hero’s welcome upon returning home.

In October 2017 he delivered a lecture at the Serbian Military Academy on the subject of the “heroism and humanity” of Serbian soldiers during their “counterterrorist operations” in Kosovo in 1998-99 and during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.

On May 9 2019, he headed the World War II Victory Day parade through the streets of Nis. The showpiece event was organized by Russian war veterans with the backing of the Serbian authorities.

In March 2021, on Serbia’s public broadcaster, Radio-Television Serbia, RTS, in a discussion programme Upitnik (“Question Mark”), which focused on the anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Lazarevic dismissed the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians who fled Kosovo in the spring of 1999 to avoid the crackdown by Yugoslav troops and police. Asked about this mass flight, Lazarevic told RTS: “We knew that they would stage an exodus.”